Ataxia
by Dahne
Summary: She will not regret. WolfMeryl, shoujo ai.


She was a desert creature. The cold slid down into her marrow fast. She ignored the teeth it sank into her, listening for the click as they settled tight around her bones; it was inconsequential. As brief as her time here had been, would be, the underside of her skin was lined with permafrost. Unimportant. Someone had to feed the dogs. She would wonder why they were there, if it mattered. A pail swung heavy with her steps, the galvanized metal handle cutting a line in her palm through creased black leather.

"I wonder why these guys are here," the girl said. She was watching, wearing the pistol at her hip as though accustomed to keeping it there.

"Stay away," Wolf warned. "They bite."

The girl held her hand out to one. It padded to her, sober-eyed, and sniffed like a tame puppy. She wore no gloves. The tracks the dog left were cast in bottomless black in the low, weak light, perfect and surreal.

"I can help," the girl said.

"Fine." It was easier than arguing. She would lose interest soon enough. Other people did that.

She came each day, red hair stark, dissonant in the grey and white and black. Wolf looked at her, and wondered that this would be the shape of the devil sent to vex her. She aped Wolf's silence, until she forgot and chattered, her words suspended in clouds of warm steam. The valley's silence was sharper in the mornings, like the cold.

"What are their names?' she asked. The pack looked wolfish as it snapped at the chunks of meat half-frozen in her hands.

"I was a small child when I last gave an animal a name," Wolf said. "It's foolish to get attached."

"I call that one Alice." The girl pointed at a white-eared bitch. "She's always running around like she's looking for a rabbit hole."

"There are no rabbits here." She would have seen them.

"Even better."

They were not all named, but most had them by the time it had to end. She would pull holly from a pierced paw and christen the bearer Baldur, or point to one that drove a threat back from a bitch and its pups, laugh, and say, "Galahad!" There was no internal logic to them, beside the initial quicksilver connection. Genji and Errol, Lady and Athena.

"Why are you taking care of them?" she asked, long after Wolf expected her to.

"I'm the only one they let close," Wolf said. Long teeth snatched meat from her grasp, and she imagined as always that they met farther back and took a finger too, stared down in dull wonder that none of the blood was hers. "They don't like men."

"Smart dogs." The bitterness in her laugh rang awkward, as foreigners do, as she bent down behind a grey flank to wash the blood off into the snow. Wolf would not be led. What this girl did was nothing to her.

"You'll catch frostbite," she said.

* * *

"Why are you out here?" 

"The dogs need feeding." It was a clear indication that she would refuse to speak of it.

"That's not what I mean. Why are you-" Her arm took in the valley, the island, as though it were that easy. "-here?"

"I was sent here."

The girl fell silent, and Wolf thought she had given up.

"I never knew my parents," she said, face averted so that she spoke more to dog than Wolf. "I thought that by being like them, being a soldier I mean, I could get to...know them better, in a way."

It would never be Wolf's mother tongue; it was alien, always would be, and things leapt at her, that would fade into the landscape to the eye of a native. Things like tense. She said nothing.

"What about you?" She would never be used to green eyes. "You must have a family. Wolves aren't solitary animals." Her smile was shy and earnest, pathetic.

"My pack is long dead."

"Oh." The girl looked abashed, as though the memories rested easy unless disturbed by an outsider. "I'm sorry."

"Did you kill them?" said Wolf, gently patronizing.

"No..."

"Then don't be."

The girl nodded as if she had said something profound. Wolf watched her, and wondered if she really knew so little.

"The dogs need feeding," she said, once there was no one to hear.

* * *

They shared sleeping quarters, as the only women at the base. When times grew harsh, or had harshness imposed upon them, it was one of the absurd niceties that humans chose to retain. She would never understand them, and she called it fortunate that she would never have to. The others could handle that, as they did. Give her her target, and that was enough. 

The girl never stopped moving, from the moment she sprang up from the old mattress that never ran out of dust. It was the fire in her, down where the snow couldn't touch. Wolf watched her, in the way she watched everything, heart slow as a deep old drum muscles tight and still until until until. Without looking, she watched her watch as she spilled the pill into her palm, fitting soft between the parallel lines that spoke to another hunted people, or so she had heard. People could be so credulous. Much could be learned from a hand, if you read it right. A hand like hers, as she belted on the Desert Eagle in its holster; calluses, no scars. Young. Her own hands had never been clean like that. She would have remembered.

"What does '_ky îro_' mean?"

Wolf let the motion finish, let the capsule disappear down into her viscera, leaving her hand where it landed against her lips too long before saying, "What?"

"_Ky îro_." She said it well, for a foreigner, casually, doll-fingers scuffing against black boot leather. "You say it every morning, when you wake up. I had to listen a few times to hear what it was. Sounds like a question."

"Nothing." She must have listened in the same way that Wolf watched. She had underestimated her. "It doesn't matter."

The girl only shrugged. "Suit yourself. I was just curious."

"_Qareen,_" Wolf muttered, tugging on her gloves with sharp, angry motions, but the girl only glanced at her.

Wolf watched as she pulled a white jacket up her arms, watched as the indelible fox carved in heavy lines on her arm disappeared beneath the fabric, wondered if an old man had ever told the girl stories of days that never happened anywhere in the world.

Wolf kicked snow off the door, and thought about mornings.

* * *

_Sand was everywhere. Dirt, and grit. It sunk in, down where after a while it either maddened you or you couldn't feel it anymore. Two kinds of people, as always. It caked around the corners of the eyes, so that opening them meant feeling it again, even when you thought you'd forgotten. _

_The daylight, aching in under the lids. Trying not to picture monstrous, unnatural blisters, trying not to sift every molecule of air for a smell more horseradish than mustard or a vile faint-fruit stench. Hearing a wet cough etched with pain. The distant, high wail of ordnance, or worse, not so distant. As soon as she could, believing every time that it was better than not knowing up to the moment she got her answer, she asked. _

"_Who today?"_

_

* * *

_  
She was practicing again, in the place the dogs never came, as if there were an invisible barrier that permitted only who it chose. Never still. Left with little to do amidst the preparations for the field exercise she believed she would take part in, the girl hunched over a PSG-1, and it would have been amusing if only it wasn't. In the white sea she could see her drowning.

Far off the target. And too slow. It might have been a kind of talent, going too fast to get a proper bead and still taking too much time to get off the shot.

She watched, for a while. The way the eyes narrowed more at every attempt. The way she lay prone, couched in hard-packed powder, ignoring it maybe or maybe feeling it seep through her skin. The little cataclysm when she pulled the trigger, and the distant metal ping the bullet sang as it hit the wall. She was putting pressure on the wrong part of the stock, giving her shots the capricious pattern of sullen rainfall. Why had no one ever shown her better? It was nothing, to Wolf.

"No." Her arms drifted down around the girl's, hands wrapping around her wrists. She did not jump at the contact; to her credit. She must have felt her eyes. "Like _this_."

* * *

"They say that sometimes you fall in love with your target," the girl said.

Wolf should have known. She forgot to adjust for elevation, the tricks of range determination, to account for wind direction, and this she remembered. Wolf reminded herself to have a little talk with 'them' later. She pulled a small black tube from its inconspicuous nest, applied the color in two ruthless swipes. It had been the first thing she had bought here, lipstick. It gave her power, to lie without saying a word.

"Do they?" she said noncommitaly. Snow tapped soft unsounds on the barracks windowpane. It was a friend to her, the white soft water, as was anything that hindered the senses of a target. It occluded hers as well, but she did not dwell on that. The small brushing away of powder from her scope reminded her blood that motion was possible, sometimes necessary. The walls around her were spare, ugly, and functional; her breath was invisible again.

"Yeah." The girl pulled things out of her footlocker, put them back, in service of some esoteric purpose. Her motions were smooth and preoccupied. She drifted through piles of clothing, all in the same drab that made her vibrant coloration only more startling, more djinn than customary woman, alien in this cold place.

Wolf told her not to ask, in all the silent ways she had that always worked. For once, with her, they did.

* * *

Her silence held only so long. Maybe she had been waiting until they were out under the open sky to ask, until the snow and blind grey walls made it so that there was no other living thing in the world. The night fell out of order. It was the place. The sun slanted down on it, skewing the heartbeat pattern it was always too late to realize one had grown accustomed to. The girl did not give up easily. The light had faded long before, leaving the snow with nothing to reflect. She fired again and again, correcting, at times improving and at times not, and did not seem ardent for some desperate glory, and Wolf told herself viciously that she might as well be.

"Have you ever loved someone?"

Wolf adjusted the girl's scope, hands sliding over the weapon, nails clicking against the glass. The metal was chilled from the air, but it grew warmer the longer it rested against her light skin. She lay prone in the snow, Wolf crouching over her, realigning her arms.

"Yes," she said.

"Someone you haven't shot," the girl amended.

Wolf skimmed cursorily through her memory. "No."

"I don't understand how you could do it. Shoot somebody you love, I mean." Even tone, but her fingers belied her. She knew it was a weakness. Hands could tell so much, if you paid attention. Much more than eyes, that were always the same. Curling around the trigger, straightening again, clutching and unclutching.

"I would not expect you to."

"Come on now. Don't be that way." Her face creased with petulance lips too red, eyes too big. She never used anything false. That made it worse. "Tell me."

Showing was always better. She believed that.

"Whatever that is," Wolf said, arms encircling her to guide, eye indicating the blank silhouette of the target, "whoever it is, that is nothing. It could be anyone - an enemy, a friend, a lover. It means nothing. Cause and effect, bullet and skull, that is nothing to you. The rifle is all that matters.The iron cold and real to handle, shaped for a drive straight ahead. You are the same." The girl narrowed her brows, and believed it like the other lies. "Line up the shot. And shoot."

She hesitated. The grip tightened.

"Shoot!"

Slightly farther off the target than usual, but still within a range to do significant damage. Not bad.

"Good."

* * *

She liked the disassembly. Unfitting as well as it fit, the parts interlocking one into the other and coming apart again with enviable grace. It fit neatly into its case, the catches snapping closed with a finality that satisfied her. She lifted it to set it into her trunk.

"I didn't know you liked poetry."

She slammed the lid shut, but the insufferable grin told her that it was too late.

"Go to hell," Wolf told her. The grin, she noted, was lopsided.

The girl crouched there, arm resting on her knee, as though she could wait forever. Wolf sighed, took her hands off the trunk, and settled back, leaning so that the rough wood bedpost dug in between her shoulder blades.

"It was something I picked up a long time ago," she said. "Saladin thought it amusing." The way his eyebrow had arched above the blank black leather when he found the space beneath her weapon case lined with tattered paperbacks. The look of incorrigible innocence from time to time when her attention had turned for a moment and she looked back to find the collection mysteriously multiplied. She thought she had forgotten that. "Perhaps he thought it humanized me. It was a fault I could forgive him for."

The girl slid down, shifting her legs beneath her with strange grace, to kneel with her hands folded in a way that was nearly civilized.

"I should have figured, before," she said, eyes down but open, green striated by long lashes. "I thought I recognized it. Come to me only with playthings, now..."

"Stop it," Wolf said harshly, and she looked up, startled. Maybe it was out of apology that she sighed, and maybe the unfamiliarity was what let it happen. This girl was not her target.

She watched, watched her watching. She watched her hand rise up to be singed by that unnatural color. Watched her listen as she said, "The red of new climbing roses..."

"A beautiful, useless thing." The crooked smile had returned. "It's half right, at least."

"Yes," said Wolf, and let her decide.

She should have predicted it. Prescience of motion was nothing to her, less than a reflex. The space a person occupied now and where they would be in a moment were the same, the duality burned into the backs of her eyes. The decision of direction, speed, gait, whether to run or hide or crawl or do nothing, but there is no such thing, all is a decision if only to stand or breathe or wait or die, the calculations before drawing breath, she could see them, could see the hesitation left in every motion of every human, who had no choice but to try, to always try, never to make a motion that they could not take back. She saw the breath of beetles, the coves where birds hid their secrets, the ecstasy of desperation in a balanced battle before it was her turn. After that long, blind time in the sands at the beginning, nothing had ever happened but that she saw it first.

It happened before she saw it.

She wondered at it, briefly. So little, to change so much. From the general state of not-kissing to the much less complacent one of feeling her with lips she had thought long frozen to sensation by lack of it, in one swift fall forward easy enough to be accident if it weren't not. She tasted like something drunk to cover the taste of something else. Wolf leaned closer, realized it and pulled away.

"You don't know what you are doing, girl," she accused. Her lips were dry, and to moisten them she had to taste her again.

"Yes I do." She went to defiance first, thought second. So young. Imp-efreet, _qareen_, mirage. "And I'm not a girl."

Her thumb drifted up, nail clipped short in sacrifice to practicality, and ran over Wolf's lips, shy and clumsy and sweet and brazen.

"You little fool," Wolf said. "Do you have any idea?" She left it, thought or threat or warning or endearment, for the girl to complete.

"No," she answered wryly. "But I'd like to find out."

This kiss was shyer, sweeter, less bravado and more promise. She tasted like sincerity.

"Wolf," she said, the callused softness of her hand floating down the side of her face in artless caress, smiling like a child. "You're beautiful."

"Don't say that." She hated when people said that as if they knew her.

"All right, I won't." The crooked half-smile. She had always liked things better, when they weren't fully perfect. It made them more so. "You are, though."

Wolf's eyes closed, trying not to see, to for one damned god-forsaken moment just stop watching. "You know so little."

"You might be right." She could feel her hands on her neck, stroking the place where a good shot would kill. Those timid bird-hands. Pale skin, but warm, heat radiating from it in waves slow to dissipate. When had she come so close? Her breath sang transient against her, and the arched mouth parted to let free her poorly-guarded secrets.

"But I can learn."

* * *

Her first thought upon waking was what a fool she is, and her second was how little, in the end, it matters.

The worn page her Saladin had given her. The binding loose from handling, holding on only by the remnants of yellow-brown paper at the bottom, and better for that. Things touched at sunset in the quiet. Noticing only by the reunion of her lips that she had spoken, that she had asked. The hand that settled on her stomach, too slender for anything but a toy. They were in the same place; she did not know why she was so warm. Perhaps she had stolen fire when the gods weren't looking and hidden it in long gold-leaf sheets beneath her skin. And perhaps she could, because she had slipped behind her and stolen the words of her battered home to say, in that child's voice:

"_Çumirov_."

Her mind cleared enough to ask, uninnocent tongue thick with sleep,"Where did you learn that, _qareen_?" but Meryl only smiled.

* * *

She is in the cold now, and she does not think of that. She stands in one, she rests her rifle across the sill of one, but she does not think of windows, she does not think of stolen warmth, she does not think of dogs bounding toward her while she laughs as if it were safe. She does not think of the things they had wanted to forget. She does not wish that it had been different.She will not regret. She refuses. She does not feel herself shaping her question, and she does not hear the new answer, the _no one _she had not waited for. She does not think of the shock of cold morning air, of seeing the red mark left below the white collarbone and making her wash it away. She does not think of the fool who exposed her belly to a carnivore. She does not think of the other question, of how, and she does not think of the truth she will not say, that she has never learned to love something she cannot destroy. She will find what she has been waiting for, and she will not regret.

She was never her target.

Her finger tightens, and it is nothing to her.


End file.
